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Kyle McNabb, in my opinion, is one of the best analysts in the ECM space. He recently co-authored a report “Identifying When To SharePoint, Or Not, For Business Content Needs”. This has some interest findings and quotes:

“A SharePoint initiative is like bamboo: the challenge isn’t getting it to flourish; it’s keeping it from taking over your IT garden”

“many I&KM professionals would say I’ve worked with ECMs, and I know ECMs. SharePoint, you’re no ECM”

Pandas may like bamboo but it not so good for managing content when the compliance and productivity of your company depend on it.

The limitations are discussed

• Lack of repository scalability
• Lack of structured workflow support
• Limited support for non MS-Office file types
• Limited lifecycle management

Some key lessons are discussed:

• Higher value content such as contracts or engineering assets are often stored in non-SharePoint systems
• Large files such as schematics can bring the system to its knees
• Often SharePoint is used as a work-in-progress repository and are then published into an authoritative library

This brings me to my point. Companies are having to:

• Manage more content not less
• Manage content for more users not less
• Offer greater compliance and productivity

ECM for the masses should offer a very low-cost set of simple content services for all users and all content that scales across the enterprise using standards so that all applications and all users are equal citizens. This is not SharePoint.

Forrester point out that the attraction of SharePoint is that “in conjunction with Office 2007 it offers a comfortable, if not intuitive, working environment for business users.” What is really required is a simple SharePoint front end such as MS-Office or another simple web-based consumer client accessing the enterprise content services. As Forrester point out Web parts to mimic the SharePoint user experience fall short. “to date, only Alfresco has implemented support for the SharePoint protocol to match SharePoint’s integration with Office desktop applications.”

Alfresco 3 addresses  these issues:

• Native SharePoint protocol support
• CMIS standards support through REST and Web Services bindings
• Share - a simple consumer web application for collaboration on content with a flex document previewer enabling office 2007 and non-Office 2007 users to share documents
• Email In support for document storage and discussions
• Support for all content types, Microsoft and non-Microsoft, large and small files, high-value and low-value content
• Scalability beyond the dozens of of SharePoint recommended restrictions - 100GB databases (often users restrict to 30GB for acceptable performance), 50 million documents per server
• A content services platform for Alfresco and non-Alfresco applications - MS-Office, Joomla!, Open Office, mediawiki

Alfresco can be downloaded at:

http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Download_Labs

I would encourage you to read the Forrester report at:

http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,47368,00.html

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